A Fascinating Video Lecture on the Wall St Crash

This is a video link to Liquiat Ahmed's lecture on his book The Lords of Finance. It's an absorbing and fascinating account of how 'the wrong economics' was applied in the 1930s, it has interesting parallels with today.

Hi guys, here's a video from the Guardian Website on the Berlin Wall. It is now 20 years since it was dismantled (I was there when it was being pulled down, I have a piece of it somewhere) but its significance in the Cold War should not be underestimated, it was a physical representation of the world divided and it symbolised the whole conflict.

Sunday night roundup

At the moment I am being the very worst of my book junkie self and reading first chapters of lots of different books. Last night I read the first chapter in Howard Zinn's People's History of the USA, I am a great hedger of bets when it comes to allying myself with different schools of history, I don't completely discount the idea that 'great men' have in some instances, had an impact on history, but I am far keener on the idea that it is historical forces that are far beyond the control of individuals or movements that determine things to a far greater extent. A people's history can be loosely described as a view of the world that is the story of mass movements and of the outsiders. Society's curent default setting when coming to evaulate the past is heavily influenced by today's hyper induvidualism. A society that worships the self above all things is hardly likely to pay any attention to the notion that their current wealth and prosperity is based in large part on a forgotten notion of solidarity, collective struggle and sacrifice for ideals greater than the individual. It's far easier for the children (and in some cases grandchildren) of the ME generation to look at history as a succession of 'great men' who did things becuase they were determined, single minded and above all 'right'.

The first of these 'great men' that Zinn looks at is of course Columbus. The Venetian weavers son and master mariner decided to try to emulate Marco Polo but this time to find a sea route to Asia, knowing, as all the most educated men of the age knew, that the world was round. He did not expect for the continent of the Americas to be in the way. He discovered the Bahamas, then Cuba, and then Haiti and in doing so began the genocide of the Arawak people. The figures vary, whether Columbus and his successors murdered one million, three million or eight million people is unclear, but surely on of the most monstrous and bloodthirsty campaigns in history was perptrated against the peoples of the Carribean, and it was their extinction that made the Spanish think next of African captives to replace them. Columbus was desperate for the Arawak's gold, gold that barely existed, in order to pay back the loans underwriting his voyage, so desperate that he forced every Arawak to deliver a quantity of gold per month, those that did got a copper trinket, those found without the trinket had their hands chopped off. Columbus will never, ever be mentioned in the same breath as Hitler, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible or Mao, even though he is guilty of comparable crimes. the reason for this is because the ideologies underpinning the Nazis or the Russian or Chinese Communists is too alien to us, to contrary to our ways of understanding the world. Greed we can get, empire, we understand. The idea that in creating something as glorious as the Americas, a few eggs had to be broken along the way is something that most of us have assimilated and naturalised a long time ago. It does not make for comfortable thinking that a large part of the West (and therefore our) way of life is built upon genocide. Columbus the Mariner is the limits of what we can accept, not Columbus the mass murderer.
Other books i perused last night were a couple of second hand titles on the Wilson Plot and Kenneth O. Morgan's The People's Peace. More on both later.

Two views on Welsh history

I recently mannaged to acquire a copy of "When Was Wales?" by Gwyn Alf Williams, a book which I'd had recommended to me by a couple of people that I know as a good overview of Welsh history from a marxian perspective. (The book is sadly out of print, which is a great shame as it offers a a lively and clearly written commentary on the history of Wales.)

During the 1980s, Williams was something of a household name in Wales due to the success of The Dragon Has Two Tongues, a TV series which he co-hosted with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, in which the two historians engaged in bitter polemical exchanges concerning the way in which the history of their country ought to be interpreted. The casting of Williams the firebrand and the gentrified Vaughan-Thomas as ideological sparring partners was a stroke of televisual genius which drew in a wider audience than most historical programming of the time - I've been told (perhaps with some exaggeration) that the pubs would empty when it was on. Hard to imagine something similar happening for Simon Schama. The first episode of this landmark documentary can be viewed on YouTube. Unfortunately no DVD release appears to be forthcoming.

The book opens with R.S. Thomas' poem Welsh History, which is appended by a caveat from Williams: "This fine poem expresses some historical truths. It also sanctifies a monstrous historical lie." The truths and the lie are not identified by the author. The reader must proceed and attempt to establish these things on their own.

Williams' main preoccupations are "when to begin?", "when, if ever, has Wales been able to describe itself as an independent nation?" and "will it ever be able to do so again?". He sees the Welsh people as a nation emerging from the ruins of the declining Roman Empire - an embattled group of Brythonic speakers who would come to be left isolated in two Western peninsulars of Great Britain. The Welsh people, as they would come to be known, are a people continually in a state of crisis, moulded by a series of shocks inflicted from outside. It's in this aspect of his analysis that Williams' thinking is most obviously Marxist - Marx's famous dictum to the effect that "men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing" echoes resoundingly throughout these pages. The withdrawal of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy beyond Offa's Dyke, a series invasions from other parts of Britain and Ireland, the instability of the various historical kingdoms of Wales, the "Act of Union", partial industrialisation and Anglicisation are all narrated as a stream of events influencing the development of the Welsh as a stateless nation.

Williams has a gift for witty and provocative turns of phrase, one of my favourites being "those who the Gods wish to destroy, they first inflict with a language problem" - a wry comment on the linguistic divisions that affect Wales. (One of the notable features of modern Welsh nationalism is its traditional difficulty in attracting English-speaking voters from south Wales - given that over fifty percent of the population of Wales resides in south Wales, this is a problem with significant implications for the success of the Welsh nationalist project. Compare the position of the SNP: unafflicted by such a linguistic divide, save for a small number of scattered communities, its succeeded in securing a leading position in the Scottish Parliament.)

In many ways this is very much a book of its time: written in the aftermath of the disastrous 1979 St David's Day referendum on an elected assembly for Wales (in which only 20% voted in favour), the author sees little hope for the future of the Welsh nation - indeed, he concludes by describing the Welsh as "nothing but a naked people under an acid rain".

It's interesting to compare the content and tone of William's work with John Davies' A History of Wales. At over 700 pages, it's a much more weighty work than "When Was Wales?" (in comparison, a relatively concise work at just over 300 pages). Originally published in Welsh as Hanes Cymru in 1990, then published in English in 1993, the new 2007 edition contains a new chapter on developments in Wales since 1997. In contrast to Williams, Davies opts for a more sober reporting of what is thought to have occurred over the course of Welsh history. The first chapter begins with a brief discussion of the various points at which the beginning of the history of the Welsh people have been posited and then, accepting that while there are valid arguments for starting the story at any of those dates, chooses to start with a discussion of the archeological evidence concerning the earliest life in what we now know as Wales.

The scope of the text is amazing; Davies weaves a skillful synthesis of the political, social and cultural history of Welsh life which is undoubtably fast becoming the definitive book on the subject. I think what I most admire about his writing is that it offers a detailed description of events, presenting to the reader a considered analysis that never loses its lucidity.

The point at which the tone of the two books is most noticably different is in their conclusion. As already noted, Williams' book is rather pessimistic about the future of the Welsh. Davies, in contrast, seems remarkably upbeat. In the closing pages of his book, he notes a number of structural and cultural developments that he regards as "the building blocks of a nation" and states that he believes "the Welsh nation in its fullness is yet to be". Can this difference in perception be attributed mainly to the age in which the two texts were published - about thirty years apart - or to one of temperament and political sensibility? Williams states in his closing chapter: "Small wonder then that some, looking ahead, see nothing but a nightmare vision of a depersonalised Wales which has shrivelled up into a Costa Bureaucratica in the south and a Costa Geriatrica in the north; in between, sheep, holiday homes burning merrily away and fifty folk museums where there used to be communities." He sees the economic devastation of vast swathes of his country, plundered over the ages by an extractionist economy. Davies sees a number of symbols of future statehood emerging and concludes that there is hope for the future. Which of these two visions will be realised remains open to question. What is certain is that both of these books are required reading for anyone interested in the subject.

-- Contributed by David H

Russia

This is just a quick note, I've got a lesson about Napoleon III to teach in a moment so I will return to this later. This article in the Independent caught my eye. This is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is nothing new, it's a pretty time honoured response of Russia to the states on her border and also to the management of the shared past in Russia itself. Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to adopt a scandanavian style of democractic socialism at the end of the 1980s when it became abundantly clear that the command model of economic mangement wasn't working. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein makes a number of interesting parallels between the October Revolution/Bolshevik coup d'etat and the establishment of the oligarch's Russia. In both instances, a democratic people's revolution had taken place beforehand, and in both instances a dedicated, power hungry and deeply politicised elite group clung on to the coat tails of the people's revolution and subverted it using armed force.

She writes: "Once again a group of self-described revolutionaries huddled in secret to write a radical economic program. As Dimitry Vasiliev, one of the key reformers, recalled, "At the start, we didn't have a single employee, not even a secretary. We didn't have any equipment, not even a fax machine. And in those conditions, in just a month and a half, we had to write a comprehensive privatization program, we had to write twenty normative laws... It was really a romantic period."

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced the lifting of price controls, predicting that "the liberalization of prices will put everything in its right place." The "reformers" waited only one week after Gorbachev resigned to launch their economic shock therapy program-the second of the three traumatic shocks. The shock therapy program also included free-trade policies and the first phase of the rapid-fire privatization of the country's approximately 225,000 state-owned companies."

Following this Yeltsin effectively staged an anti parliamentary coup by attacking Russia's White house in October 1993, he did so to quell the many mutinous voices who lamented the pillaging of the Russian economy by domestic and foreign 'capitalists'.

"A clear signal from Washington or the EU could have forced Yeltsin to engage in serious negotiations with the parliamentarians, but he received only incouragement. Finally, on the morning of October 4, 1993, Yeltsin fullfilled his long-prescribed destiny and became Russia's very own Pinochet, unleashing a series of violent events with unmistakable echoes of the coup in Chile exactly twenty years earlier. In what was the third traumatic shock inflicted by Yeltsin on the Russian people, he ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian Whitehouse, setting it on fire and leaving charred the very building he had built his reputation defending just two years earlier. Communism may have collasped without thr firing of a shot, but Chicago-style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns-all to defend Russia's new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy"

This was the political backdrop to the previously most recent re-writing of Russia's history. Glasnost has very little to do with burying the memory of Stalin and discrediting October 1917, instead the violent imposition of free market capitalism has required a wholsale re-writing of history. Soviet communism wasn't regarded as a mistake from any human or humanist point of view, as many of the violent anti democratic practices from state repression to imperialist war in Chechnaya still endure. It was regarded as a mistake from the point of view of market orthodoxy, the free market revolutionaries of the 1980s and 90s helped to create a coup in Russia's system of ownership and in her collective memory.
More fool them, Russians are up there with the Irish for long cultural memory, the sufferings of the Russian people have been such that their very survival has depended on an ability to remember. Neoliberalism is in tatters, a totally bankrupt and utterly discredited idea, spread throughout the world with evangelical zeal. Unfortunately the former USSR bought into the idea when she was in a vulnerable position, it was a mistake that cost, New Internationalist estimates $400 billion in wealth siltd out of the country, never to be returned. History is being re-written again, authoritarian nationalists are in charge, the old glory days of Kursk and Berlin are being reimagined for a new generation as many Russians are waking up to the strong suspicion that they've been done over royally by the perennially untrustworthy west. In the west there is a new and mounting post Litvinenko paranoia about Russia. Again, thisis nothing new, the last 200 years have been marked by an almost never ending concern about Russia and her plans, the 1840's saw extraordinary levels of British public animosity towards Russia, all fuelled by rampantly jingoistic newspapers, the 'Great Game'.

Hobsbawm on Gramsci

Check out this link, it's eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci and his significance for our times.

Hobsbawm on Gramsci

Some interesting observations

This is an interesting link from some of my favourite writers at the moment, including Eric Hobsbawm and Richard Overy, on the question of the BNP.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/09/bnp-fascism-meps-far-right

Never Had it So Good/ White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook

I have now managed to come out of my post election gloom and have decided that the immense intelligence of the majority of British people will prevail and see Nazi scumbags back to the margins where they belong before too long. Anyway, lets talk about history books shall we? Yes that's much better. In the last two years of my bookselling career, I have noticed a trend towards revisionist readings of the '60s and 70's. If by revisionist one means the scrutinising a recieved truisms, then certainly Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good, and White Heat, histories of the Macmillan and Wilson Years both count. The 14 years from Suez to the first Heath government are fascinating for a number of reasons.
At a lecture last year by marxist historian Chris Harman, a very familiar view of 60s radicalism was recounted, albeit from someone who lived at the time and who was politically active at the time. The lecture was excellent, though it was very much preaching to the converted, and it gave the listener the impression that the radicalism of 1968 was one of the more dominant features of the 1960s. In this regard Arthur Marwick has also propagated a very traditional view of the decade as being all about LSD, peace banners and swinging Carnaby Street.
This is as fanciful as suggesting that in our time everyone lives next to a celebrity footballer or has been on Big Brother, it is a way of taking aspects of an era wildly out of context, important in small ways as they might have been, and inflating their historical impact and importnace. Student radicalism in the USA and Europe was a far larger phenomenon than in the UK, spawning the Yippie movement and the human potential movement in America and the Baader Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades in Europe. In Britain, no such radical transformations took place, and by 1969 the high tide of student radicalism had come to an end.
Dominic Sandbrook's main contention is that Britain struggled with two main issues in the period 1956-70, the new affluence that was part of a worldwide economic boom, a new affluence that changed how people dressed, ate, shopped, travelled, holidayed, where they lived, when they got married and how much leisure time they had. It was an affluence the sent gradually destabilising waves through Britain's social structure, largely unchanged since before World War One. The women's movement, gay rights and the peace movement, all seen as being products of the 1960s, were in fact, Sandbrook argues, the products of earlier decades, and in the case of the women's movement, the 19th Century.
He also concludes that on the whole, the British were a largely conservative lot throughout the 1960s, the shock of the Rolling Stones arrest and the Redlands trial shows, in Sandbrook's opinion, not that the Stones were particularly hard living and anti establishment at this point, certainly in the mid 60s they lived comparatively tame lifestlyes. Instead it demonstrates the deeply orthodox and conservative attitudes towards, sex, drugs and youth rebellion. Similarly, during the Profumo scandal, the actual details of the case were relatively trivial, John Profumo had had a relatively brief affair with Christine Keeler, he was a very junion minister in the War Office, had very litle intelligence to pass on to the Young Keeler, who in turn would have been most unlikely to have informed the Russian spy Ivanov of anything at all. The media furore and the public interest was symptomatic of a growing anxiety among British people that attitudes, beliefs and manners were changing at a speed that they were uncomfortable with.
The other main crisis of identity (And I do believe that ultimately these two books are about modern British identity) that has faced Britain in the post war era has been that of world role. Never Had It So Good Starts off with the Suez Crisis, Britain's last attempt to act as a world power, undermined by America, who threatened a run on the pound and the bankrupting of the country. After a humiliating withdrawal from Suez and the resignation of Eden, the stage was set for a gradual decline in Britain's world imperial power status. Macmillan was, oddly enough, a far more enthusiastic decoloniser than Wilson. The cost of Empire and its long term potential for conflict was uppermost in his thoughts, but, in a manner which is typical of muddled British priorities, we still mantained strategic bases in Aden, Hong Kong, Cyprus and Gibraltar, along with huge defence budgets. This meant that, along with the new and expensive welfare state and NHS, Britain was living for at least two decades far beyond her means. Dominic Sandbrook cites this as a pivotal reason for national economic decline nad a late decision to enter the EEC also added to our post war woes. When in 1949 Britain had the option of joining an embryonic European trading entity that would allow for a fixed price for coal and steel Herbert Morrison complained that 'the Durham miners will never wear it'. It was De Gaulle's great pleasure at the end of 1963 to veto the membership of Britain to the EEC that realley dealt the killing blow to Macmillan's faltering rule.
Partly the British Mandarin class's obsession with Atlanticism and the British public's imagined relationships with Empire left us out in the cold until the early 70s, but the reality was more to do with our inability to accept new world realities, combined with French intransigence.

The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

I woke up this morning, sat on the end of the bed and allowed myself five minutes on gloom on hearing the news that corpulent fascist Nick Griffin has been elected MEP for the North West. Yes, that hallowed subsection of Englsih turf from whence I come, that produced a generation of my family that fought the Nazis, that sacrificed six years of their lives on aircraft carriers, in munitions factories and in the deserts of North Africa, has now produced one to represent us. There was, in this instance, only one place to turn, and that was to Primo Levi's final work, The Drowned and the Saved.

The biographical etails of Levi are easy enough, as an Italian Jew living in Mussolini's Italy he joined the anti fascist resistance in 1942. Levi always saw himself as being an italian first and foremost, but after his experiences at the hands of the Germans he felt consigned to be Jewish to be 'other' permanently.
He was caught in 1944 and was taken to an Italian holding camp and then transported to Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist kept him alive, working in a synthetic rubber factory shed during the freezing winter of 1944. I have read this book many times, and I have recently lent it to one of my pupils, who, i is my great pleasure to say, wnt on to read Levi's The Periodic Table.
Levi was consumed by guilt, by a shame that comes with surviving, he writes that the real witnesses to the holocaust were those that did not survive. Whilst he did not leavea suicide note when he fell to his death in 1987 it is widely speculated that the guilt of surviving had been a contributing factor.
Levi left the world with a hauntingly bleak poetic descriptiveness of life as a prisoner and a survivor. He expains in the book that the prisoner, on liberation has two responses, to turn inwardly and never speak of his torment and shame, or to adopt the opposite position and 'precieve in their imprisonment, the centre of thier life, the event that for good or evil has marked their entire existence'. Of escape he writes 'Even admitting that they managed to getacross the barbed wire, the electrified grille, elude the patrols, the surveillance of the sentinels armed with machine guns in sentry towers, the dogs trained for man hunts: In which direction could they flee? To whom could they turn for shelter? They were outside the world, men and women made of air'. The scope and depth of the powerlessness resonates through the reader with every word, the extent of our luxury, our privilge, our freedom is only tangible when we read such words. It becomes clear also that the privileges that we enjoy in a period of historically unrivalled peace and material prosperity have left us blind and deaf to such terrible and degrading violence.
That is why this is such a potent and timely book, it is written as a simple guide to the utterly incomprehensble, the testimony of a wise and moral individual who at the end of his life could nor forgive but strove always to understand.

Reappraisals by Tony Judt

The subtitle to this book is 'reflections on the forgotten 20th Century', which at first glance seems like a rather odd proposition. What is there about the century of mass genocide, totalitarianism of the left and right, space flight, total war and the globalisation of commerce and culture, that could be forgotten? Plenty, it would appear, a BBC documentary some years ago held an exit poll outside a New York movie theatre, quizzing people about the historical war epic they had just watched. An astonishing number seemed to be labouring under a range of misaprehensions, sure that the war happened in the 60s, that it was fought against the Russians, That Kennedy was America's wartime president etc. A few years ago whilst lecturing at UWIC I discovered students who had no idea what Auschwitz was, or who Himmler, Goebbels or Goering were. History students, to boot.

How is it that the common intellectual currency of previous generations is now rarer than faberge eggs to the post cold war, internet savvy era? Tony Judt suggests in the preface to the book, which is essentially his collected essays written over the last two decades, that the triumph of western liberal capitalism over Soviet communism has led to the closing of the western mind. Two decades of triumphalism that are now drawing to a close wih our current crises has created a situation where people are more likely to forget history, or if they are to be aware of it at all, to understand it as a series of History Channel naratives or Hollywood blockbusters. the real depth of understanding required to understand its lessons. The first part of the book is dedicated to waht Judt calls the now extinct 'Republic Of Letters, that made up so much of the intellectual life of the 20th Century, his praises Camus and Hobsbawm, pours scorn on Althusser and seems quite wearily dismissive of Hannah Arendt, his old friend Edward Said is recognised in this sections as being perhaps the last of the constituents of the republic. The rest of the book features more conventional essays ranging from the Fall of France, the delusions of Blair's Britain and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a discussion of Israel, how it won so many wars but failed in peace so consistently.

This is a book for lovers of modern history who aren't content with cosmetic and commercialised takes of an era that we are still struggling to undersand, or as Judt puts it, forgetting as fast as we can